The increasing cost of fossil fuels has created a demand for alternative energy sources. This demand is reflected in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. RFS has set standards to increase the volume of renewable fuel required to be blended into gasoline from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022, composed of 15 billion gallons of renewable fuel and 21 billion gallons of advanced bio-fuels (16 billion gallons cellulosic bio-fuels).
One theoretically feasible way to produce alternative fuels is by chemical conversion of carbon containing substrates using non-enzymatic catalysts. In practice, development of this technology has revealed a variety of technical problems including, but not limited to, fouling or poisoning of catalysts, unacceptably low yields of conversion product and requirements for reaction conditions which make the conversion process industrially unattractive.